Why Women Are Awesome

Men say a lot of things about women. Men say that women’s judgment comes and goes with the moon. Men say women can’t drive. Men say women can’t do math.

The role of men in society is rarely questioned. Their level of freedom relative to the opposite sex is not a frequent topic of discourse, nor is their status determined by their companion gender. In the majority of the world’s population, women’s worth is determined completely by men.

There is a global scale of variability in terms of how men treat women. Men can treat women like chattel. Men can treat women like equals. Men can bounce around in between and find some twist of chivalry. If a woman goes to Iran, she is treated differently than she is treated in France. If a woman is a mother, she is treated differently than if she were a bachelorette.

It is not the disastrous inconsistency of women in the world that humankind needs to worry about. It is, instead, the vacillations of men’s views of the world and the women within it that the global population should consider a threat. How did men come to hold the keys and say that women couldn’t drive? How did men come to determine the benchmark of correctness while women struggle to measure up? Over time, the concept of worth and power has become hyper-sexualized and skewed towards men. This power gradient has become so ingrained in the human mind that women themselves discriminate against women. Women are as capable as men. They are more capable than men if capability is judged by college acceptance rates, graduate school acceptance rates and the female employment rate comparable to men. Men say women can’t do math.

Here’s an equation to ponder:

{(2009 Total U.S. Adult Employment Rate) – (“All Women Sent Back to the Kitchen”) = (49 percent of the earning population)} (Source: New York Times)

If you want to really want to destroy America, send all the women home.

If women are considered to be governed by the pitch and yaw of hormones, how does one explain the inconsistency of men? Women’s primary sex hormone is not an anabolic steroid that causes hyper-aggressive behavior. Testosterone, which builds muscle, gives men the physical edge over women. The hormone has been determined to be the dividing line between the genders and biologically establishes the foundation for masculine-feminine interaction.

Because of the nearly neolithic association of strength with masculinity due to the steroidal affects of testosterone, humankind has found itself stuck in the current gender conundrum. There is a basic physical component that seems to determine the relationship completely. Men have taken this concept of power and reformed it in their own image, and by their traditional, societal control, have made it impossible for women to equal them. This is what makes the female struggle for equality so difficult.

Socially, a woman can only be considered powerful up to a certain level before she is said to be taking on a masculine role and is demonized for it. Both men and women criticize the individual woman’s assumption of masculinity as unnatural and outside of her specific gender role, which is presumably passively running a vacuum cleaner with a ring on her finger.

The current trend of female achievement falls outside of the ancient perception of female behavior, or, the negation of male behavior. It is uncomfortable because this social shift is so massive that the old masculine association with power and aptitude is showing its limits. The modern world includes women. The modern world includes women in powerful positions. A woman does not have to be a man to be powerful.

Even in the most progressive societies where women hold legitimate power, men feel threatened by the push against their traditional power role. As men projected puissance on themselves, they projected women’s burgeoning role in society as a threat. This has prompted the defamation of women in modern society, in classrooms, in dorms and in the workplace. If it is women who are perceived as “old fashioned,” why are men having trouble adapting to the new world order?

Those catty remarks about modern women are derived exclusively from fear, the masculine fear of being less than superior. Men will have to adapt their view because the problem is not with women ruining the world; it is that men refuse to adapt to a gender power shift and accept the possibility of gender equality. Men should grow up, get out of the sandbox, and start acting like adults instead of using the “girls have cooties” line of reasoning.